The Daisy Picker

(Tivoli, 2004)

Translations: German

My first baby. I had such fun writing this: it flew together and I loved every minute I put into it. I couldn’t believe when it won a two book deal – I think I was afraid to breathe properly from the minute I heard the news to the day I got my box of advance copies, in case someone had made a horrible mistake! I called my heroine Lizzie O’Grady in memory of my maternal grandmother, who was a wonderful woman.

In brief: Lizzie’s life is going nowhere until she ditches her longtime fiancé, gives up her job, says goodbye to her parents and heads off in her Fiesta, with no plan beyond finding a bed for the night and taking it from there…